Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure
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Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure
#2The intro paragraph is about halfway down after a mass of self-indulgence. It should have been first, of course.
Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure
#3Not stated in the article: There are very few places in the world with two large lakes, separated by a lot of height and not much distance.
Wherever that happens, it is probably financially a good idea to build one of these.
But that geography is really rather rare, so the rest of the world will probably have to use gas peaker plants (environment-killing) or battery storage (expensive).
Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure
#4The intro paragraph is about halfway down after a mass of self-indulgence. It should have been first, of course.
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Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure
#5I had the luck to visit this as a child, before all the tourist side of it was shut down. I remember taking the bus past the giant turbine hall. A few facts I can remember:
1. Carol Vorderman did a lot of the engineering calculations, before she started on Countdown (probably only relevant to the UK lot).
2. They couldn't run powerlines from the facility to the grid as it's an AONB so they had to run them underground at a cost of £1M per mile for however many miles.
Great place along with Sellafield and the wind turbines in Norfolk for a kid to visit.
Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure
#6I had the luck to visit this as a child, before all the tourist side of it was shut down. I remember taking the bus past the giant turbine hall. A few facts I can remember: 1. Carol Vorderman did a lot of the engineering calculations, before she started on Countdown (probably only relevant to the UK lot). 2. They couldn't run powerlines from the facility to the grid as it's an AONB so they had to run them underground…
Sounds like we did a similar set of school trips, I remember standing in a big loud hall on top of the Sellafield reactor, and down inside electric mountain by the big turbines. I was most sad that they don't do tours at the moment, I wanted to take my daughter there.
Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure
#7I had the luck to visit this as a child, before all the tourist side of it was shut down. I remember taking the bus past the giant turbine hall. A few facts I can remember: 1. Carol Vorderman did a lot of the engineering calculations, before she started on Countdown (probably only relevant to the UK lot). 2. They couldn't run powerlines from the facility to the grid as it's an AONB so they had to run them underground…
I did this at primary school too! We had a picnic next the bottom lake.
Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure
#8I think it was someone on the Volts podcast[1], either David Roberts or a guest, who made the point (I'm paraphrasing) that one of the most helpful things a regular person can do is start to think of solar arrays or windmills as beautiful; if building them isn't "climate but eyesore" but rather a "climate and beauty" proposition, they are much more likely to get built.
Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure
#9Not stated in the article: There are very few places in the world with two large lakes, separated by a lot of height and not much distance. Wherever that happens, it is probably financially a good idea to build one of these. But that geography is really rather rare, so the rest of the world will probably have to use gas peaker plants (environment-killing) or battery storage (expensive).
There are lots of places where such things can be built though. TVA's Raccoon Mountain is an example. https://www.tva.com/energy/our-power-system/hydroelectric/ra...
There is water at the base of a lot of mountains, just knock the top off and build a lake.
Re: Electric mountain: Power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure
#10Not stated in the article: There are very few places in the world with two large lakes, separated by a lot of height and not much distance. Wherever that happens, it is probably financially a good idea to build one of these. But that geography is really rather rare, so the rest of the world will probably have to use gas peaker plants (environment-killing) or battery storage (expensive).
Pump-storage hydro is for load balancing as it can’t store anything on a grid scale and is very inefficient. Sadly, it could never replace gas — the U.K. alone would need thousands.